On April 3, 2000 at 2:15 AM, Pacific Time, Terence McKenna, author, visionary, psychonaut, mathematician and rancanteur succumbed to brain cancer. One of the most vital of the 20th centuries' psychedelic proponents, McKenna had been ill since March 1999, when tests performed following a series of brain seizures revealed a malignant tumor in his brain. After what appeared to be a successful operation to remove the tumor last November, reports began to circulate that he was recovering with the help of both conventional Western and alternative therapies, but the illness was simply too catastrophic to overcome.

In addition to writing, McKenna was a well-known and truly admired speaker at think tanks, conferences and universities around the world. He often worked as a live pundit at all-night rave parties and was a "scholar-in-residence" at the countercultureEsalen Institute on the Big Sur coast. Among his theories was the idea that consciousness, awareness of self, initially occurred when African protohumans, forced to forage on land after the Sahara Forest disappeared, consumed magic mushrooms. The self-awareness engendered by the mushrooms in turn needed expressing, which led to the development--in what would become the human branch of the primate family tree--of language.

Though his theories were always complex and frequently over-the-heads of his audience, he had a natural Irish wit and sense of communication that absolutely charmed those listening, whether they understood him or not. So profound was his belief in the importance of psychedelics to the development of human spirituality and evolution that with his first wife, Kathleen (Kat) McKenna, he started a preserve on Hawaii in the early 1990s with the intent of collecting and growing as many of the world's known psychotropic plants as possible, a project she continues to this day.